The folks at Muxtape are saying that they will be back and that no artists or labels have complained. But, for a music industry that is speaking out of one side of its mouth about how they "get it" now and have learned their lesson (over and over), it doesn't look great.*

This is exactly what the RIAA wants, by the way. Even if services like Pandora introduce people to tons of music (personally, I've bought a ton of music I found on Pandora), much of that music is not from an RIAA-member label. The RIAA knew exactly what it was doing in pushing these higher rates: it was killing off alternative routes to promoting non-RIAA music. The RIAA labels have always thrived off a very limited distribution and promotion channel. After all, distribution and promotion are where record labels really make their money. Competing methods of distribution and promotion are threats to be killed off -- and the RIAA may have succeeded here (with Congress' and the courts' help, of course).

*If this is a publicity ploy by Muxtape after the initial shiny wore off on them, they are geniuses.

Update: Use your whack-a-mole analogy here: 8Tracks does the same thing as Muxtape as is living and breathing at the moment.

Comments

This is an interesting post. While the major labels work out new business models, there exists today many legal ways for innovators to create music services within the existing legal framework. Go to http://www.volumerates.com/ for more.

I don’t think an entertainment cpomany would do a deal, they don’t want to break ranks and they don’t want to be a target. They made a deal with imeem, Warner music was the first to sue and soon after the lawsuit was dropped and a deal was announced, the other record labels quickly followed on with their own deals. Your comment about non-infringing uses of this media is valid, but if muxtape is going to use this defense it will have to demonstrate that the majority of the content is posted by copyright holders. This will mean extensive policing of mixes and a content filtering system to enforce the copyright limitations. This then leads to a question: how can an indie band promote its tunes on muxtape if it can only post its own tunes. Well the answer is obvious there becomes a white list' of cleared music and the extent of this catalog depends on which labels want to make deals.But even extensive limitations may not be enough. Around the end of last year all Universal Music artists on myspace had their music converted to 30 second previews because Universal wanted a share of the advertising revenue from myspace (just like what all the labels get from imeem), myspace eventually gave in. I see a few outcomes for muxtapeStep 1 lawsuits from content holders1) muxtape gets shut down Unlikely2) muxtape bans all major label music, makes cheap deals with indie labels possible, but the majors may force some settlement terms on muxtape to drop the lawsuit3) muxtape finds a VC who'll pay the 30million dollars bribe it'll need to convince the labels to drop their lawsuits and let them in. Step 2 Pay for the bandwidth, label deals and employee salariesa) advertising everywhere! Say farewell to your yahoo google analogyb) Subscriptions make users pay, and leave the freeloaders to their ad encumbered music sites.I don't see subscriptions on their own as being likely, but they might be offered as a premium feature where users pay not to see or hear ads.

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